1. Field
The present invention relates to resource management in a data processing system, and more particular relates to real-time analysis of resource availability when generating a comprehensive resource request for remote resource fulfillment.
2. Description of the Related Art
In today's highly competitive, global economic climate, many companies are resorting to outsourcing certain operations to other companies and/or countries in an effort to control costs. A user/customer that desires such outsourcing must work with a supplier (outsourcer) to define and manage the work to be outsourced.
Grids are environments that enable software applications to integrate instruments, displays, computational and information resources that are managed by diverse organizations in widespread locations. Grid computing is all about sharing resources that are located in different places based on different architectures and belonging to different management domains. Computer grids create a powerful pool of computing resources capable of running the most demanding scientific and engineering applications required by researchers and businesses today.
The above described outsourcing environments are evolving to include a Grid computing model where users request remote resources to be allocated dynamically. However, today's technology usually requires significant advanced reservation, e.g. days to weeks. In these scenarios, a maintenance level service agreement may be in place between the customer and the supplier (the outsourcer) whereby the customer will only have access to certain resources to compensate for overload scenarios such as periods in which the local customer resources are over-utilized and additional work must be pushed off-site. However, current service level agreements (SLAs) are typically very static. In order for suppliers to adequately plan and architect a collection of resources, e.g. firewalls, network partitioning, etc., customers ask for a specific set of resources and are not given access to any resources that do not match that type, or even a certain class of service like security. The customer does not have access to an “open environment” behind the supplier's firewall. In addition, a resource request in such an environment is often a fairly complex description of requirements (hardware, software, networks, etc.) which must be parsed in its entirety before any decisions can be made about available resource pools, pricing, and time to allocate such resources. In this type of on-demand environment, it would be desirable to process resource allocation requests more efficiently with a dynamic resource request system, where the SLAs can become more generalized and more resource options may become available.